Enterprise Social Media:Top Business Drivers

How are businesses really using Social Media? It depends on how Social Media can help them.

In a recent post I wrote on how Best-in Class companies are using Social Media to enable and empower their sales force.

According to research (Sales 2.0 – Social Media for Knowledge Management and Collaboration) conducted by Aberdeen Group Best-in Class companies are using Social Media to empower and enable their sales force. The benefits for the sales force and the company include:

Saved time
Greater productivity
Deeper customer knowledge
Deeper Product knowledge

It’s not that easy to find in-depth research on how enterprise companies are actually using Social Media, so I was very pleased to find more insights in the Aberdeen research.

According to Aberdeen who benchmark companies by Best in Class, Industry Average and Laggard, 59% of Best in Class companies think using Social Media tools for collaboration and communication in the sales department is a priority.

So what do we mean by Best-in Class Performance?

Aberdeen used four key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in class companies in this research:

Year-over-year increase/decrease in the amount of time sales representatives spend on admin tasks
YOY performance in lead conversion rates
YOY performance in the percentage of sales reps achieving quota
YOY increase/decrease in sales cycle time (average time to close a deal from initial outreach to signed contract)

Given the importance of the sales function the fact a high number of these companies give such a high priority to Social Media is significant.

Understanding The Landscape

73% of Best-in Class companies plan to increase their budget for the enterprise use of Social Media technologies in 2009, compared to 60% of the other two groups? And, if you’re wondering about the focus of these companies’ Social Media efforts, 45% of of them currently use internal and customer facing Social Media Solutions compared to 21% of all others. (Source: Aberdeen Group)

This tells me there is plenty of appetite and support for Social Media in these companies. However, it’s important to understand what drives this appetite… it’s not because Social Media is the hottest new thing or because they feel they’ll be left behind – or left out. There are other drivers and it’s crucial to understand what they are.

Business Pressures

Top-line revenue growth and improving sales productivity are the top two pressures driving the use of Social Media in Best-in Class companies, according to Aberdeen. In addition to taking specified actions, these companies use defined, enterprise-wide processes and, importantly, Senior Management is fully committed to internal facing Social Media Solutions.

This means:

Best-in Class companies, Social Media isn’t simply confined to the Marketing department, it is enterprise wide
Social Media technologies solve an identified problem, such as improving productivity and growing revenue
Social Media technologies have to integrate with existing tools, such as Customer Relationship Management and Document Collaboration
For these companies, Social Media is an enabler, not an add-on

Don’t Sell Me Tools….Solve My Problem

If you’re a consultant seeking to persuade companies of the value of Social Media, don’t start with the tool. I see many Social Media solution providers attempting to sell the tool… whether this be Twitter, Blogs or Facebook. They are trying to “sell Social Media.” It doesn’t work.

Rather than selling “Social Media,” consultants need to think in terms of providing the solutions to the company’s top pressures. Which means they first have to understand what these pressures are, what capabilities the company already has, how they’re being used and which Social Media technologies will integrate and enable.

In the case of Best-in Class enterprise companies and the pressure to improve sales productivity and revenue growth the most popular tools are:

Internal Blogs (for individuals)
Internal Wikis
Social Tagging tools

It begins with understanding the landscape, identifying the key drivers and identifying the problem and then proposing the solution with the appropriate tools and processes.

With sales force collaboration and communication being key priorities for many enterprise internal-facing Social Media technologies are uniquely suited to enable the sales force – and the company - to achieve business objectives.

Thoughts?